Alice B. Grist

That band around your middle and the thunder in your thighs is keeping you small right?

And of course, you will be happier when you are so many ounces, such a dress size, ever so slinky and small...

How about this instead? Maybe the desire to be 'less' is a state of delirium imposed on you by a society that wishes to sell you anxiety. When you buy into that anxiety you become a pawn. One who lives out his or her life beholden to your own bodily parts. So you don't move forward, you may not find true love, you never quite commit to that career move, you choose badly based around self perception, you say no more than yes, you lose perspective to the feelings of self loathing.

Yes, the desire to lose weight, to be less, is precisely that. A recipe for a life of less. And I speak from experience. I remember when my days were practiced around the possibility of attending the gym and the requirement to eat appropriately. It was an obsession. It defined me. I didn't get much done in those days... My mind and heart danced around my perimeters, but no further. Then I opened to another aspect of myself. A part that transcends bones, skin and fat. My spirit. It weighs nothing, and it changes everything.

Here is a four step spiritual 'cleanse' that may just change your everything, and help you to lose the turbulent gravity of weight, that sits heavy in your heart...

1) Open to the idea that you an an everlasting spiritual spark of amazing. You read this far and therefore, you are open to there being, 'something more'. Now what if that something more, is you? What if you go on beyond this life. What if you incarnated here with a purpose, one that is so much more than checking in on the bathroom scales. Consider that you are infinite and that the source of all love and power resides right inside of you. Yeah it's big. And yeah you are, in spirit and soulful stature. And that is where big counts.

2) You can't reach your big, fat, bountiful spirit if you are consumed by and consuming an appetite for less, for being less, for becoming less, for losing weight, and in that same breath losing sanity, losing soul and losing self. There is so much literal junk standing between you, and the idea of your forever self. Here are a few examples of decluttering and allowing your spirited self to step forward. Stop buying magazines that inflict heartache on you due to the unrealisitic images. Stop perusing facebook in a comparative exercise, counting flaws and comparing waists. Don't buy things you don't need to adorn yourself. Just be for a little while. Free from images and comparison.

3) Feed your soul instead. Look to what makes you happy on a truly base level. What did you love as a child? Revisit it. Do what you used to do, and do it lots. Think hard on what you love. Find expression for any self loathing you have and transmute it into your creations and your art, your work and your journal. Let it bleed from you until you are left with something that feels a little more like self love.

4) Meditate, masturbate, read, pray, take long baths, be in nature, put your phone down and find some silence (frequently), be only with inspirational people and talk only about wonderful things, write down your night dreams and decipher their code, write down your day dreams and step towards them, refuse your minds need to return you to fear; dance, sing, draw, colour, garden, cook, eat, learn. Forgive yourself for something. forgive someone else. Move on. Expand in a hundred ways. Get bigger. Take up more space in the world.

I have given myself a new job. And it isn't one that's going to pay an awful lot. It doesn't have a job description, or a benefits package, or even a holiday allowance. and it is this. I am a feminist. I didn't even have to apply. Happily I was raised this way. It has come through, in pieces, in my precious books. But they were names 'high heeled' and so the message may be lost at first sight.

Another lesson in never judging a book by it's cover. But then again if I'd have wanted so share my feminist credentials, I wouldn't have named it that. I wasn't ready.

That is how this week has struck me. It has me deeply wondering on worth and purpose and the point. And I came up with this. My point is, hell, my purpose is, to follow my feminist beliefs in all the ways that suit me and that light me up. Because this week has been a hell of a week for women. For me. And I'm not even a subject of the kingdom where this shit went down. I'm a half American brit, with an English passport, and a gob full of awe that my Atlantic sisters, in the land of the free, are set to be ruled by this pussy mongering misogynist.

I started off November feeling a shift coming. But I couldn't put my finger on it. I knew I was tired out doing what I was doing. I was missing something. At the new moon I found myself praying to the goddess. Make doing what I want to do easier. Make it something I do as naturally as the wave hits the shore.

Then Trump was elected and bam, the fact I am a feminist, and always have been, became the most important thing. And I remembered the book I was writing, the one called Woman. The one that feels like some kind of culmination of all that went before in my life. The one that feels a stretch too far for my capabilities, a challenge, a vision fucking quest. The one that is going to push me. And even in spite of this, feels easy. It feels easy because that level of pushing feels right. Like a baby. It aches and it burns, it feels like you might just die, but something in it feels right. And it is in the burn, the fear, the conquest, the inevitable birth where the ease comes.

So that is me. Transformed by November already and it's only the 11th. I will now be pulling back a little on my tarot readings. Channelling all I have into the next book, Woman. And all the other energy I have goes to my children, my partner, and my self, as I live in this life as a Woman, raising two girls, determined to make some difference, whether it be through my writing, my instagram, my books, my babies.

Love to you all. I hope that however this week has hit you, it has hit you in the heart. The resultant trauma being one of grand, great, life changing creativity and purpose.